What is it about?
Commonly, simple empirical “descriptors” are used to connect the atomistically calculated material properties to performances of devices where these materials are used. For solar cells, the most used descriptor is Scharber model; which is a single parameter model based solely on the energy gap. This ignores the inhomogeneity of the absorption spectrum and the imperfect transport. In this paper, we proposed an improved descriptor for solar cells where both the absorption spectrum and the imperfect transport are considered without the need for further calculations. The absorption is obtained from the same electronic structure calculations used to determine the energy gap and various transport models are used based on the nature of the calculated gap. The results illustrate that the proposed model predicts more accurately the practical conversion efficiency.
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Why is it important?
The proposed descriptor shall allow more accurate assessments of the performance of light harvesting materials.
Perspectives
Computational sciences have become an essential pillar of science beside the theory and experiment. Previously, the material selection for application was mostly based on known materials as, till recently, experimental data were the main source for screening materials. Despite the rich data, this certainly limits the screening space. However, the sophisticated computational capabilities have provided an alternative route to explore new materials for solar cells much beyond the rich experimental data. To match this from device perspective, it is important to develop more accurate descriptors, which are used to filter the computationally obtained data.
Prof. Fahhad H Alharbi
Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An efficient descriptor model for designing materials for solar cells, npj Computational Materials, November 2015, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/npjcompumats.2015.3.
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